has kept abreast of the times, using any means that seemed
to promise usefulness, ever ready to change where change was adjudged
wise, ready to drop anything that in the shifting conditions had
outlived its usefulness, loyal to its past, yet realising that the
highest loyalty is to a future ideal rather than a past achievement. Mr.
Beecher was no iconoclast, and at the same time, the past, however great
and grand, as such, had no attraction for him. His eye was set on the
future, a future that included the individual life and the corporate
life. Present-day socialism had scarcely dawned during his day, but were
he living now he would be found in line with the broadest and the
freest conceptions of society, and true to his belief that the church
should lead. This not because it is an organisation, including wise men,
or divinely ordered, but because it expresses in the fullest and best
way the divine principles that must govern society. That this idea of
his so dominated the church in its early life and has continued to
control it to the present day is the true basis for confidence as to its
future.

Plymouth Church will stand just so long as it represents this ideal, and
applies it to all classes and conditions of men, without regard to race
or creed. To-day, as of old, men of every form of belief or no belief
find a welcome and find help, and many go forth with old ideas changed,
new ambitions stirred, a clearer vision of what it means to live a
Christian life. If the time ever comes when that is not true, then
Plymouth Church will be a relic of the past, a curiosity, to be visited
by strangers as Plymouth Rock or Westminster Abbey. That that time will
ever come I do not believe. However much the centres of population may
change, the needs of men never change, and even if other churches should
follow their constituencies to other sections, Plymouth will remain, a
living monument to the truth and the life that has been from its origin
its power.

* * * * *

THE END

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Sixty years with Plymouth Church, by
Stephen M. Griswold

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